Sarcastic waving

Oh dear god. Worse than ever.

There’s a second video of the killing of Eric Garner.

The second video shows the choking while one officer grabbed Garner around his neck, and threw him to the ground. It also, however, shows the seven minute long aftermath, where a disgusted bystander films the lifeless body of Eric Garner left on the sidewalk with police officers shuffling around him and seeming relatively undisturbed by the fact that they had just killed an unarmed man for not paying a few pennies of tax on cigarettes. [Read more…]

Oops I forgot to do a title

Anna Merlan at Jezebel reports on a new porn series featuring rapes of women crossing the US-Mexico border. Rape is a major risk for women in that situation.

That evidently sounds pretty arousing to the porn conglomerate MindGeek, formerly Manwin, who are behind the series. As the Daily Dot was first to report, the series was launched by MindGeek earlier this year, a major European company that also owns YouPorn, RedTube and many other major porn sites. It’s produced by Mofos, a porn studio that focuses on “real amateur girls.” Here’s a nausea-inducing description on the “Border Patrol Sex” homepage:

Watch these guys hunting the illegal female immigrants and giving them a lesson on why the law should be obeyed. [Read more…]

That word “objective”…

A federal judge said Nope to another attempt to get evolution banned in Kansas public schools.

Citizens for Objective Public Education (COPE) actually had the nerve to argue that teaching evolution amounts to teaching atheism, and therefore should be banned as a religious point of view in the classroom.

Learning about evolution could, following a train of thought, lead to atheism, but I can think of other things that could also do that – like reading the bible for instance; like going to church, like listening to sermons, like thinking about the idea of “god.” Pretty much anything could lead to a train of thought that ends up at atheism – or theism.

Americans United put it this way:

Everything about that argument is flawed. Contemplating the origin of life on this planet is not an inherently religious question that is unfit for children to ponder. And science has done a fine job of unlocking the mysteries of the universe – despite COPE’s claim to the contrary. Evolution may be a theory, but no legitimate scientists question its validity. Thus learning the facts of that theory is not “indoctrination.” It’s called education.

US District Judge Daniel Crabtree apparently agreed, because he threw out the case.

Learning can take you places. Deal with it.

 

Uh oh

Oh crap, that’s scary.

An unidentified drone came close to hitting a plane as it landed at Heathrow, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has confirmed.

An Airbus A320 pilot reported seeing a helicopter-style drone as the jet was 700 feet off the ground on its approach to the runway at 1416 GMT on 22 July.

The CAA has not identified the airline or how close the drone came to the plane, which can carry 180 people.

It gave the incident an “A” rating, meaning a “serious risk of collision”. [Read more…]

Knowing v accepting

How do we draw the border between what we know and what we have learned from people who know?

The question is prompted by a discussion on a public post of Ed Brayton’s on Facebook about sophisticated theology and Karen Armstrong and agnosticism. Dan Linford (who teaches philosophy) said this:

Armstrong thinks that we can know that it is true that “God exists” but we cannot know what that sentence means, both because we do not know what God is nor do we know what ‘exists’ means.

[Read more…]

Catherine has one son and 35,000 daughters

Another one from A Mighty Girl – Dr. Catherine Hamlin.

Australian obstetrician/gynecologist Dr. Catherine Hamlin has spent much of her life living in Ethiopia where she has revolutionized care for a childbirth injury called obstetric fistula. Dr. Hamlin, who celebrated her 90th birthday this year, was nominated for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for her work building the world’s only medical center dedicated to providing free repair surgery to poor women suffering from this devastating condition — one that affects more than two million young women around the world.

[Read more…]

You’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!

About this business of all of us being just manifestations of PZ – Russell Glasser wittily quoted an apt bit of Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

Here she checked herself in some alarm, at hearing something that sounded to her like the puffing of a large steam-engine in the wood near them, though she feared it was more likely to be a wild beast. ‘Are there any lions or tigers about here?’ she asked timidly.

‘It’s only the Red King snoring,’ said Tweedledee. [Read more…]

The only male cheerleader

Oh, no.

Ronin Shimizu, a 12-year-old boy in California, killed himself after he was bullied for being the only male cheerleader on an all girl team. Does “after” mean “because” here? It’s impossible to know for sure, even if he left a note saying so, but…being bullied doesn’t generally make kids happier.

‘I heard that people called him gay because he was a cheerleader,’ one of his teammates told CBS Sacramento at the vigil.

Ronin was the only male cheerleader with the Vista Junior Eagles Cheer Team.

[Read more…]